Protesting Beyoncé's performance is a show of ignorance.

Beyoncé has the kind of star power that shifts conversation, influences culture, and conjures up emotions strong enough to make the Black Panther Party the center of discussion on race relations in America in 2016.

Since the biggest pop star in the world dropped her black power themed video for “Formation,” the Internet has been in a haze of think-piece frenzy. The Super Bowl performance a day later had folks clutching their pearls at her audacity to center blackness. Donned in black berets atop their fluffy ‘fros, Beyoncé’s dancers helped pay homage to the Black Panther Party in honor of its 50th Anniversary. That means 111.9 million viewers heard Beyoncé sing about how much she likes her “Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils” while watching her all-black female dancers get in an X formation, likely a nod to Malcolm X, and slay the field dressed as the iconic women of the BPP. That has made some people very, very angry.

A news anchor said the performance deprived “little white girls” racial harmony. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani thinks she used her platform to “attack police officers.” And Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke called the BPP a “subversive hate group.” Like 50 years ago when the BPP was founded, people are still abundantly clueless about who the BPP was and what they stood for.

For 14 years Ericka Huggins was a member of the Black Panther Party. Huggins joined in 1967 as an 18-year-old committed to the human rights movement. Huggins was the director of the Oakland Community School, a community-run child development center founded by the BPP, from 1973-1981. Her storied past with the BPP is one etched in history, marred by pain, struggle, and triumph. Her husband John Huggins, also a Panther, was killed three weeks after the birth of their daughter. She is a woman who lived and breathed the Panthers. As a professor she now educates young people on who the BPP party were. When asked her opinion on Beyoncé ‘s performance she was abundantly grateful and said so are many of the Panthers.

“I just have such gratitude for Beyoncé’s bravery and her generosity,” Huggins said from her Oakland office. “I wish I could tell her. I wish there there was a way she would know that there are many members of the BPP who really appreciate her. I am just grateful to her for choosing to use her art for the upliftment of black people and humanity in general.”

By the time we chat Huggins has admittedly watched “Formation” and the Super Bowl performance many times. She is in awe by the historical references, the art, the beauty of black womanhood, the message. She has very little interest in the backlash. She lived through it when her BPP friends were being incarcerated, assassinated, and criminalized by the press. Although she is not surprised that people are likening the BPP to the KKK, she’d rather tell you what they truly stood for instead of rebutting the opinions of the misinformed.

“My mother grew up in the south,” she recalls. “The clergy in the south had to arm themselves from time to time to protect their families from very vicious attacks. From firebombs bombing, churches being burned, women and children being killed, families being uprooted. This was common. There’s no way to compare the two [the BPP and the KKK]. We didn’t seek to hurt anyone.”

In fact, according to Huggins, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the BPP in October of 1966 because they were tired of seeing people die. “The Black Panther Party was not created just to end police brutality, but to uplift communities of people who were suffering from the inequities and imbalances of a government who valued some lives more than others,” Huggins recalls. It sounds eerily similar to why today — still — we have to declare that black lives matter.

Huggins along with founder Bobby Seale were direct victims of the inequities of the criminal justice system. In 1969 she was arrested on conspiracy charges in connection with the murder of Panther Alex Rackley. The trial sparked national protests that questioned if a member of the BPP could receive a fair trial in America. The jury selection process went on to become the longest in Connecticut state history. The jury failed to reach a verdict in 1971 and she was released after she’d already served two years in prison.

The Panthers have always been misunderstood by people committed to misunderstanding them. Even the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s that preached non-violence had slews of detractors who did not want integration or equality for blacks. It’s simply the fabric of America.

A common misconception is that the BPP was pro-violence because they utilized their Second Amendment rights to bear arms. They weren’t for violence. They did believe in self-defense against the violence being inflicted on them and the black community as a whole. At its core the BPP’s mission was simple: establishing social, economic, and political equality across race and gender lines. The Ten Point Program is pretty clear on what the BPP wanted and what they believed. Nothing in it suggests hatred or violence. “I know that I don’t hate anybody,” Huggins says. “And I really don’t remember anybody in the Black Panther Party talking about hating. Bobby Seale said, in the film that will air on PBS next Tuesday, ‘That’s ridiculous. We don’t hate anyone because of their color. We hate oppression.’ And that was the truth.”

The BPP also started community-based programs like the Breakfast Program that provided free breakfast to over 20,000 schoolchildren in 19 cities. They set up health clinics in 13 cities, the Oakland Community School, the People’s Free Ambulance Service, the Black Panther Newspaper, and the Black Student Alliance that unified black college students with the community. Huggins remembers the BPP forming coalitions for all people. It was a black organization that believed in the humanity of everyone.

“We were not [a hate group],” she emphasizes. “We loved the people closest to us, nearest to us. We immediately formed coalitions of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, American Indians. We formed coalitions wherever we could because people of color in the United States at that time, and still now, were suffering [from] the same harm.”

Many of the critiques are the same ones hurled at the Black Lives Matter movement of this era. History has an unfortunate way of repeating itself in that way. Black people taking a stand against oppression and systematic injustices terrify a certain segment of America. “There was backlash then, there is backlash now,” she adds. “If in fact you are a person afraid of change, then you will strike out at the changemakers.”

People will go on critiquing Beyoncé’s political stance, they will go on to spread lies about the BPP. What’s important to Huggins is to that we talk about what is true and uplifting. For her it’s important to celebrate what Beyoncé has done while also learning about the women who she says ran the BPP because the men were “routinely arrested, incarcerated, and/or killed.” Those unsung sheroes like Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, Barbara Easley-Cox, and even Charlotte Hill O’Neal are who Beyoncé paid tribute to. They were mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, educators, business women, leaders, activists, and students. They were humans who wanted a better future for us all.

“The work that we did was tremendously uplifting,” she says. “And it had its impact and legacy that is following us today. I really believe that young people will find creative ways to have us focus on unity, on coalition once again, on collaboration once again. And we can use our wisdom for good.”